Delta National Bank & Trust Co.: banker to the FIFA guys

2 June, 2015

Aloysio De Andrade Faria, a 94-year-old billionaire with an affinity for Arabian horses

A small private bank controlled by a reclusive Brazilian billionaire shows up more than two dozen times in U.S. prosecutors’ corruption charges against world soccer officials. It’s hardly the bank’s first brush with scandal.
Delta National Bank & Trust Co. has had at least three previous run-ins with authorities on two continents over the past 15 years, including when Brazilian lawmakers probed its role as the banker for a scandal-tinged head of national soccer. In 2003, Delta pleaded guilty in the U.S. to failing to report transactions linked to a Colombian drug cartel.
Even so, Delta, with U.S. assets of $467 million, continued operations from its offices in Manhattan, Miami and Geneva. Some of that business, U.S. prosecutors alleged last week, included processing millions of dollars in bribe payments from a Sao Paulo-based sports marketing business to soccer officials affiliated with FIFA. Delta wasn’t named as a defendant or accused of any wrongdoing in a 47-count indictment released by the Justice Department.
Delta’s U.S. regulator, the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, is now investigating the bank’s role in those transactions, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who asked not to be named because the probe is ongoing.
Delta was established in the 1980s by Aloysio De Andrade Faria, a 94-year-old billionaire with an affinity for breeding prize milk cows and Arabian horses. Faria has built a business empire that includes Sao Paulo-based Banco Alfa de Investimento SA, Faria has maintained ties to Delta through a Cayman Islands investment company, according to a recent Federal Reserve document and a former employee. Aloysio de Andrade Faria is a Brazilian banker; In May 2015, his net worth was estimated at US$2.8 billion. A pediatrician by training, Aloysio shared his medical interest with the financial business sponsored by his father.